The Burst is a first-person shooter (FPS) with parkouring mechanics, but these ideas aren’t presented well in-game.
Sometimes I consider myself a glutton for punishment—I tend to play games with high difficulty, urging myself to succeed in spite of all the challenges. That brings us to The Burst, a VR FPS from GoRapid Studio coming to Steam and Quest. The Burst isn’t so much a challenging game as it is an exercise in futility. Even though I’m someone who likes to push forward, there were so many glaring issues within the first couple of hours that I had to step back and ask myself if the whole endeavor was worth the trouble.
The Burst occurs in the desert world of Damag, where your special ops character is tasked with bringing down a ruthless warlord. Truthfully, I wasn’t even aware of the narrative until I read a document, as the campaign began without so much as an intro or cutscene.
From there, I collected various weapons, including pistols and submachine guns, to eliminate foes known as Shelldogs. While these wasteland mercenaries weren’t that tough, they got lucky a couple of times when they took out my character. Funnily enough, there was no death animation. Instead, my character remained standing and the screen just faded to black with a generic “You Died” message.
The Burst also presents various traversal methods, many of which pose notable problems. Your main mode of transportation, a trike/buggy, has one of the most dumbfounding controls I’ve ever seen: instead of using the left thumbstick to steer, you do so by flicking the right thumbstick, the same button used to pan the camera.
I realize this boils down to personal preference, but I prefer camera snap-turning when playing VR games. However, snap turning constantly to change the camera view while driving at high speeds makes me feel nauseated, though the option does exist for smooth turning. The worst option might be the vehicle turn toggle, which is almost akin to a turret-style setup where the trike just spins around.
Another crucial factor concerns parkouring and platforming. The Burst doesn’t have a sprint button; you can only run by moving your arms as though you’re jogging, which isn’t uncommon in VR gaming. Jumping, meanwhile, requires you to hold the “A” button on a Quest 3 controller, before pushing forward and up with your arms. The action was clunky at best, and I resorted to the running motion to make my character jump across gaps.
Worse, grappling hook controls were utterly flabbergasting. In games with grappling hook mechanics, such as Windlands 2 and Asgard’s Wrath 2, the controls are responsive enough to make traversal smoother and easier. In The Burst, however, it’s as though grapple points have a sweet spot that’s tied positioning of your hand.
As if on instinct, I’d have my hand outstretched aiming at a grapple point that’s above me or off to the side, but the prompt wouldn’t appear unless I moved my hand to the correct spot, such as at chest level. Needless to say, my character fell down chasms several times because of disappearing prompts.
I don’t mean to sound harsh. I certainly don’t expect The Burst to be a technical marvel or one that gives the same level of exhilaration as Horizon Call of the Mountain or Assassin’s Creed Nexus. Sadly, after checking The Burst for a couple of hours, it only succeeded in giving me a headache. Between the clunky parkouring and grappling, alongside numerous object pop-ins, The Burst needs a few improvements to feel worthwhile.
